


Dark Queen

by Rokeon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-29
Updated: 2005-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 18:22:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rokeon/pseuds/Rokeon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is so much more terrible than fear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Queen

> _"In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"  
> _
> 
> -JRR Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring

  


She can't imagine the eulogies will last less than three or four hours, so Virginia has plenty of time to think.

Tom was wrong, she knows now. You can't conquer the world through fear: reigns of terror are always overthrown, hated dictators always defeated. Britain hasn't had a successful Dark Lord since before Merlin's time, though it's certainly not for lack of candidates. There's a new one every generation, it seems, but each generation also produces a hero. The good guys always win.

Slytherins are self-defeating; their defining trait is ambition, but it's also their downfall. Tom never understood that. He had the perfect pawn, an innocent girl with access to the very heart of his enemies' sanctuary, and he wasted her on ominous graffiti and petrified schoolchildren. Her _brothers_ could have come up with more threatening pranks.

But he needed the terror, the attention, needed it just as much as the energy he drank through the pages of his diary. He laughed at their hate, crushed their opposition, shattered their hopes. And at the height of his power he was all but destroyed by the love of a mother for her son.

Love, after all, is so much more terrible than fear. People will kill for someone they fear, but they will die for someone they love. Fear inspires resistance, but love inspires loyalty. A dead villain will be forgotten as soon as the rebuilding is complete, but a dead hero will be honored for as long as his name is remembered.

And the sorrowful widow of the dead hero, the young witch who stares nobly at his casket with eyes red from weeping, the beautiful woman whose only remaining family is the little infant with his father's eyes?

She can do things Tom never even _dreamed._


End file.
